


The Law of Thirds

by a_series_of_inconsequences



Series: To View Me With Indulgence [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - College/University, Established Relationship, M/M, Marriage, Multi, Polyamory, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-29 17:10:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15077846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_series_of_inconsequences/pseuds/a_series_of_inconsequences
Summary: Lafayette meets a boy at the gym.And suddenly, he's watching his husband fall in love all over again.[or, a study in capturing emotion between two (or three) people too stubborn to show it]





	The Law of Thirds

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first third of To View Me With Indulgence from Lafayette's perspective. If you haven't read that yet, it will make about 200% more sense if you read that first! 
> 
> Thank you for reading, and I always appreciate your comments <3
> 
> Also, thank you oodles to @shhhhimwatchingthis on tumblr, who beta'd this for me. I'm forever grateful for your irl badassness and you're one of my favourite people.

**The Law of Thirds**

At first, Lafayette approaches Alex because he likes the fact that he can fluster him so easily.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

The _very_ first time, it’s because he hears the sound that Alexander makes as he hits the ground on the track that loops around the skating rink, sees other people watch him fall and turn away awkwardly. He’s going to do the same – there’s no point in drawing attention to the young man’s clumsiness – but then Alex doesn’t get up.

He just kind of lies there, his hands over his face, more strands of black hair escaping from his messy ponytail.

And Lafayette realizes two things at the exact same time.

First, that it’s been a while. A _long_ while since he’s fucked someone as pretty as that.

Second, that this kid looks like he needs cheering up (a talent not always mutually exclusive from Lafayette’s other aim).

That’s why he walks over. Offers his hand. But it is the fact that he gets flustered so easily that makes Lafayette look twice: the way his eyes widen as he looks up at Lafayette, the attempts at subtlety as he eyes Lafayette’s legs, the way his pupils dilate anyway, giving him away. As if his own desire startles him. As if he isn’t prepared for it.

Lafayette appreciates a challenge. He lives to take people apart. He likes figuring out the one knot that he can tease open that will cause their entire scaffolding to collapse around him. He likes watching them lose control, capturing – if they allow him – the moment of undoing: his camera lens immortalizing muscles and sweat and ecstasy on faces that couldn’t remember the meaning of shame if they wanted to.

He has a collection of them. Photographs. A private exhibition that allows him to capture something of himself, too.

It’s a hobby. It makes him happy. Mastering how to undo George Washington had been one of the greatest accomplishments of his life. That’s why he still looks: to chase that rush, that moment of power.  

And that’s why he decides almost immediately not to sleep with Alexander.

 _It would be too easy_ , he thinks, drinking in the way that Alexander seems to be on the edge already, the way the wanting snaps so quickly into his eyes, the way he seems starved for it.

The flirting is harmless, he figures. He invites him to a yoga class, assuming he’ll refuse. In the end, he leaves without giving out his number. It’s obvious the kid has it bad for someone, and Lafayette has never been one to appreciate kissing other people’s names off of his partners’ lips. No, he needs people who can compartmentalize. Who can be in the moment with him, get lost in the pleasure of it.

It isn’t until he’s walking away that he realizes that he’s given Alexander his real name. And that, even as he searches, he can’t exactly recall why.

-.-.-.-.-

That night, he tells George that he met a boy at the gym.

He rolls the word ‘boy’ over his tongue, the suggestion of it. It’s an offering, because George has been fixated lately, their pillow talk edging towards something, every conversation starting with a sigh and a “do you remember when we met?” and Lafayette slipping back into a persona he had let drop long ago.

Its not like they haven’t played like this before. But its never been something that George has seemed to _want_ so exclusively.

Lafayette is more than happy to indulge him. He misses it sometimes, feeling like that: the kind of pretty that only youth seems to capture, the kind of irresistible he’d achieved by mashing together innocence and shamelessness.

He’d been a fucking firecracker.

He teases George that night, words dripping from his lips, leaving fantasies laced around George’s neck with the flick of his tongue. Whispering visions of him and the young black-haired man together, of letting George watch them fuck each other. He leaves their phantom partner nameless, but it doesn’t seem to lessen the effect on George. Lafayette rides him on their couch, as if he’s too horny to wait, too inexperienced to last. The way he imagines Alexander might be.

When George can’t take it any longer, when he slams Lafayette back onto the couch and locks his leg around him, he fucks him harder than he has in a long time, like there’s something driving him on that he can’t rationalize.

It’s bliss.

They laugh and kiss when they’re finished and it’s still them, but…

There’s an energy there that fills up the space around them, like something unspoken.

Lafayette can’t help but grin up at him. “You met someone, didn’t you?”

He sees George rush to cover a smile. “You did, too. Your boy at the gym?”

Lafayette just buries his nose in George’s neck, languishing in the clean smell of his sweat, wondering why he still feels he has to hide his happiness.

He leans into the way that George touches him in the shower, afterwards.

Neither of them say anything else about it.

-.-.-.-.-

He finds Alexander at the library accidentally, buried in some book, chewing the nail of his left pinky intently, as if its helping him think.

And Lafayette realizes two things at the exact same time.

First, that there’s something strikingly _George_ in Alexander’s burning focus. Something that Lafayette had loved about George from the moment they’d met.

Second, that he can’t help the way that his vision of Alexander’s intensity is merging quite unintentionally with the tendrils of the fantasy he’d spun for George last night.

That’s why he puts on a repeat performance. There’s something there he can’t shake. A possibility. A wild shot in the dark.

He’s hardly surprised when that desire in Alexander’s eyes ignites like it never left.

He _is_ surprised when Alexander offers him his number without him asking, mumbling something about modelling for him. Something about taking all of his clothes off.

 _Too easy_ , echoes in his head again.

A strange, buzzing feeling echoes louder.

George calls him, wanting to leave campus early to avoid a meeting. Lafayette obliges.

He comes home with the same fantasies on his tongue, but he swallows them this time. Pictures of Alexander’s olive skin against the black sheets in his studio. How quickly he could make him come, turning into how many times he could make him come. How his face might look gasping for air, orgasm shaking his core, ripping away all of that naïve longing. And then, how George’s face might look watching them. Joining them, maybe. How it would be Lafayette learning to take him apart in a different way. Taking them both apart. It’s not something they’ve done before – their arrangement created a different sphere of interaction for both of them, which rarely intersected with their life together, except in pleasurable retellings. But the possibility lingers at the back of his mind.

He watches George’s face as they drive home. He’s deep in thought about something. Distracted, as he’s been for the past week. Bordering on lost, if Lafayette weren’t there to tether him.

“Are you alright, _mon cher?_ ”

He smiles at Lafayette. Genuine. Reassuring. “Yes. And you, my love?”

George may have convinced himself, but Lafayette knows him too well.

“What are you thinking of?”

“Just work. That thesis I’m supervising.” George taps on the steering wheel and chews the edge of his lip. He wears an expression almost identical to the one Lafayette had seen on Alexander’s face earlier in the day.

He’s not sure why he remembers that.

He thinks about texting Alexander as he drifts off to sleep in George’s arms that night.

George is asking him if he’s free for lunch, to meet the student he’s supervising, to help him prepare for a scholarship interview, to talk to him about some of the research he’d done on ancient Greek visual eroticism. Lafayette recalls bits of the background, of George talking about this student on drives home, his brilliance and how he’s thinking of things that George would never have been able to at his age. He can’t recall his name. Something simple, one syllable. Something George says with a kind of reverence. He’ll ask later, he figures. Or find out soon enough.

He says yes, distractedly. He’s thinking about other things. He’s thinking that, if he texts Alexander, and if Alexander responds, perhaps he’ll ask George if he would be interested in watching. Then ask Alexander if he’s willing. Something new, for both of them, just for a night. A gift. Fulfilling something in George that Lafayette is realizing he can’t quite touch anymore.

And if Lafayette is getting something out of it, too – something of that sweet, cloying, infatuated kind of rush he used to feel – well, that’s just a happy coincidence.  

So he does.

_alexandre, mon petit, is there any chance you are free tomorrow night? i have an opening in my modelling schedule I am desperate to fill ;)_

Alexander doesn’t text him back.

-.-.-.-.-

There’s something intoxicating about being George Washington’s arm candy, especially when Lafayette knows how good they look. It’s rare they’re on campus together like this – George has always been careful about keeping his private life and personal life separate. So Lafayette takes the opportunity to appreciate the envious looks they get from the students as they walk by, George’s body tied to his in space, almost protectively. Proudly. Lafayette’s own body broadcasting the fact that he knows exactly how right it is.

When they get to the café, George seems off. Lafayette had watched him dress in front of the mirror, buttoning down his sky blue dress shirt while looking his reflection dead in the eyes. He rarely wears it. It makes him look young. In the car, he hadn’t stopped talking about the student’s thesis, complex words tripping over his tongue, Lafayette catching most of it. It takes a backseat, however, to his keying into George’s erratic energy.

Something’s changed. He knows that much. It seems important, and fact that George won’t tell him what it is confirms it.

Once they’re seated, George is silent.

“I am excited to meet him,” Lafayette says. And he is. It’s been a long time since George has done a supervision, and Lafayette knows the energy he puts into it, the support he needs.

“I’m, ah. He’s remarkable,” George stumbles.

Something in Lafayette’s stomach flips. He hasn’t seen George like this since the early days in New York. Since he’d learned to take the world in his fist.

What reason does George have to be _nervous_?

That’s when Alexander walks in.

And everything suddenly stops.

Lafayette watches Alexander’s eyes find George, settle on him for a moment. And then, as soon as George turns, sees Alexander recognize him and stop dead in his tracks. Makes a jerky movement, as if he’s thinking about moving backwards, returning through the door that he came from.

And then, curiously, he sees the smile on George’s face falter, just for a moment. Lafayette has known George long enough to know when the mask slips.

And this. _This_ is a look he hasn’t seen on George’s face in quite a long time. He’s only looked at one other person that way in the time Lafayette has known him, and that person was him.

 _Oh_.

He knows, all at once, why he’s been asked here. Why it had seemed so important to George, why he’d been holding back his explanations. He also understands that it wasn’t so much that George hadn’t _told_ him. It was that he knew Lafayette would see it the moment he was in the same room as Alexander.

There’s a sweetness to it. The vulnerability of George trusting him to recognize it. Trusting him to meet this person.

They never meet the others. They’re interludes, not important enough to warrant it.

He watches George pull the empty chair out for Alexander to sit. Gently, almost.

He knows they haven’t slept together from the stiffness of their body language, and by the fact that George would have told him – that was their rule.

Then, Lafayette feels George looping an arm around his shoulders, their comfortable interplay of pride and playful possessiveness, in a different register this time. Gilbert can’t help but smile, lean his head back against George’s chest.

He hears the word ‘husband’ leave George’s lips.

Sees Alexander wince.

_So he did not know._

And he realizes two things.

The first is immediate, there in the tension between them: that he’s not here being introduced to Alexander as a potential one-night stand. He’s being introduced to Alexander as George’s student. George’s student who suddenly occupies most of the fantasies that Lafayette has been handling so gently at home, in their bed, in the dark. George’s student who currently has a standing invitation to their home that night, in quite a different context. A context that George does not know about.  

And he realizes that this could be a very, _very_ awkward situation.

The second comes moments later, when he’s alone with Alexander, having assured him that he’s not cheating, and explained their arrangement. It comes after Alexander’s ire has been tamed, as he exhales and turns to watch George at the counter, the expression on his face complicated, stirring up a feeling that Lafayette had nearly forgotten: the wonder of watching George Washington move through the world for the first time. It’s marked by that same tinge of desperate desire Lafayette had seen twice before on Alexander’s face. It’s marked by that same hopeless longing that ghosts over George’s features some nights.

He supposes this has been building for quite some time.

And he realizes that, if he plays his cards right, this could be much more than an awkward situation.

-.-.-.-.-

When they leave the café, he’s sure he’s going to be the first to bring it up, to have to find the words to break the careful distance they’d managed to maintain over coffee. George had never been one to be able to communicate his feelings freely – not with words, anyway.

But George surprises him.

“So. You ‘met a boy at the gym’.” He measures his words so carefully, as if there is something to be lost without the precision he puts into that sentence. Lafayette can’t read his tone. “You met _Alexander_ at the gym. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

He hadn’t meant to say it, or rather, hadn’t realized that George would connect it immediately to the image he’d used to get him hard later the same night.

They make it to their car, sliding into the leather seats, thankful for the heat after the brisk fall breeze.

There are two ways that Lafayette can play this. But he needs to hear George say it first.

He takes his phone out of his pocket, opens it to the text he’d sent Alexander, and places it gingerly on the dashboard.

George reads it. “Jesus _christ_ , Lafayette, did you - ?”

“I had no idea,” he says seriously. “I did not know he was your student.” He places a hand on George’s bicep, then says, quieter, “You always call him ‘Alex’ at home. How would I have known?”

“He’s not, though… you’re not… right?”

“He never responded. So, no. I am not. And once he realized, he was quite clear he did not want to.”

At that, George stares at the steering wheel, his expression impassive.

“It is a shame, really,” Lafayette takes the risk. “With a face like that. _Mon dieu_ , it makes you want to _ruin_ him, _non_?” he pitches his voice lower, the way he knows George likes. “I suppose I still could. You could stay somewhere else for the evening, like usual.” He lets his hand drift lower. “Although, I was thinking of inviting you. Letting you watch.”

George’s hand flies up to cover Lafayette’s, clasping it against his skin. He holds it there, tightly, whether to halt the movement or keep the contact, Lafayette doesn’t know. “Stop.”

“It is just as well, though,” Lafayette continues, working his way beneath George’s skin, “it is quite clear he has his eyes on someone other than me.”

Lafayette locks eyes with George. Says everything he needs to say that way. It works – they’ve learned to communicate too well without words. There’s no way they could ever be anything less than honest.

George looks terrified. It breaks Lafayette’s heart, the dissonance between this churning discomfort and the private smiles that had graced his lips previous nights, being hidden away, stored up for someone else.

“ _Georges_ , he is lovely.”

George huffs a breath. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lafayette. Let’s go home.”

“Can we talk about it, at least?”

“You gave him your name.” George says sharply. “Why?”

“I…”

“You never do that. Why him?”

Lafayette brings his free hand to the back of his neck, thinking of Alexander’s first embarrassed smile. Answers honestly. “I do not know. I heard his voice and… I did not even think about it.”

George takes his hand away, throws the car into reverse.

Lafayette can practically hear George grinding his teeth.

“ _Mon coeur_ , why are you upset?”

“Do you know how much trouble I would be in, Lafayette?” he says, his voice containing only a hint of the anger Lafayette knows he’s fighting back. “Do you know how much it _kills_ me – ” he bites off the sentence, feigning focus on the road. “I would lose my job. My entire career. And so I don’t, I just. I stand at the sidelines and I _know_ how wrong it is to want….”

“George – ”

“So don’t offer to let me _watch_ ,” he spits. “Just, go ahead. I don’t want to know anything about it. Tell me when to be out of the house. Wash the sheets before I get back.”

“He does not want me,” Lafayette says, forcefully enough to break through George’s rising anger. “Do you not see the way he looks at you, George? Or do you need me to tell you?”

“Don’t say that. Please.” The anger yields to sadness, like a dam breaking.

“He wants you, George. Both of us, maybe. But you, most urgently.”

“Lafayette, I’m serious. This needs to stop.”

“What, George? What part exactly needs to stop? You thinking about him? Or you driving yourself so deeply into denial that you couldn’t even tell me what you were feeling before you asked me to meet him? _What_ are you afraid of?” Lafayette snaps.

“You know exactly what I’m afraid of.”

The blood rushes through Lafayette’s ears.

“What if you just mentioned it? See what he says?”

“Absolutely not. I’m his professor, I can’t put him in that position.”

Lafayette turns from the conflict in his husband’s eyes and gazes out the window, watching the median trees go by, palates of auburn and burgundy.

“Why did you want me to meet him then? Why show me what could be if you believe it is not possible?”

George doesn’t answer.

After a while, he says, “He has already let you in, George. He is already yours. You would see that, if you cared to.”

“I said no, Lafayette.”

They spend the rest of the drive in silence.

-.-.-.-.-

That evening, Lafayette works in his studio, giving George the space he doesn’t seem to know how to ask for. It’s archival work, mostly. Adrienne has been talking about doing a retrospective in Nice. Lafayette had laughed it off: a retrospective in his forties seems self-aggrandizing even for him. Still, when Adrienne has a vision, she brings it to life.

He goes through old portraits he’s kept filed, beginning with the recent ones, weeding out options. Some work he’d done through the university after they’d given him access to paid figure models: shots of bodies intertwined in space, always two of them, always… unbalanced, somehow. They were experiments he’d never managed to get quite right. With them are candids of crowds from a pride festival they’d gone to. Canvases of skin, curves given character by shadows, by sunlight. Sweat like holy water. Expressions broken open by something Lafayette had said just before the shutter, usually. They’re too much, though. Oversaturated with life, failing to capture the viewer’s gaze, to prompt introspection.

All of them are failed attempts to capture what he still strives to: the movement of emotion through bodies.

The sorting is a simple task, but it distracts him from the terrible feeling that’s been plaguing him since they left the car. It’s not jealousy, he knows that, but it leaves the same taste in his mouth, tinged with franticness. Knowing he needs something, but not know exactly what it is or how to get it.

He finds the file of his collection of the photos he doesn’t display: the shots from his one-night stands, expressions on the knife’s edge of pain and pleasure, release leading to something absolutely human, something Lafayette cultivates. The purest form of feeling, which he tries to combine with aesthetic form.

He enjoys perusing them. Tonight, he doesn’t touch it. It feels empty, somehow.

He sets it aside, finding the folder with George’s name on it.

It’s stuffed full, bursting, chaotic and unsorted. He draws a handful of photos out.

The first is an old polaroid of George on the front steps of Henry’s high-rise in New York City, wearing an old white t-shirt and a bashful smile. With his tight black curls and the gold stud in his right ear, he looks so young. Every part of him except his eyes.

Lafayette remembers those months. When he wouldn’t let him get close, holding him at a distance, so afraid of a loss he didn’t dare speak. When they burned like two ends of a candle, convinced that the closer they got, the less of them there would be.

The second is recent, from a vacation they’d taken three years prior. George hadn’t known he’d taken it – a muted shot of him sitting on the dock of their rented lakehouse, looking out over a purple sky, the set of his shoulders revealing a settled calm in the face of the gathering pressure front.

He remembers the moments after, as the first drops of rain hit, how they’d let it soak through their sweaters as they kissed so they could peel them off in front of the fireplace, the softness of their bodies being fired like pottery, hardening into finality. It had felt like finally letting himself settle in to ‘marriage,’ and what it had grown to mean for them. He’d been everything but cold that night.

The third is a simple photograph of an oak tree, old and sprawling and sturdy, with mazes of roots. Central Park, 1992. George’s coat splayed beneath it, George still fast asleep, his body curved around the empty space where Lafayette’s had been until he’d gotten up to take the photo, in the coolness of the dawn.

The morning after the very first night he’d known.

He remembers how painful it had been for both of them to grow in the ways they’d needed to. How that empty space had looked like surrender, that morning. He remembers how far they’ve come.

Alexander is everything he can’t put a name to. Alexander, who seems to fit so perfectly into their lives as fantasy, as if he were meant to. Alexander, who has taken up permanent residence in his mind.

There’s a wisdom that had been stored in these photographs that Lafayette hadn’t known he’d needed until now.

The movement of emotion through time.

-.-.-.-.-

He finds George on their back deck, watching the sunset, a glass of rum and coke balanced on the arm of his chair, untouched. Lafayette’s matching chair sits empty next to him.

Lafayette doesn’t bother with that. He settles himself on George’s lap, his back to George’s chest, ignoring the way that George stiffens slightly. He wraps his husband’s arms around him, bringing his large hands to settle over his stomach, and tangles his lanky legs around George’s.

“I do not want you to say anything. Just listen for a moment, _d’accord_?”

George sighs deeply.

“When I look at him, I see you, twelve years ago. I see a terrifying intelligence and someone who is still trying to figure out how to use it. How to give the best parts of himself to others. But I also see someone who does not believe he deserves what he wishes for. Who would be a martyr before he ever let anyone call him worthy.”

“Laf…” George protests softly where his lips meet Lafayette’s neck.

“Shhh, I am not done. I understand it is awkward, that it is not considered proper. But I also see how you look at him. And I…” he swallows. “I am recognizing how I feel when I look at him. The first time I looked at him I thought perhaps he would end up in my collection – a one time shot, and that’s as far as it might go. I watch people come undone at the seams and it is breathtaking, but it is not meaningful. It is over in an instant. I watch you two in the same room, and it is like watching a forest fire catching. It is futile to contain it.”

Lafayette closes his eyes and leans back, finally relaxing. “When I fell in love with you, George Washington, I let myself be undone so that I could stitch myself into your fabric, and you into mine. I will not say it was not painful. It hurts to become something more than yourself. But to have felt something that overwhelming, that achingly beautiful, was a privilege. It is a rarity, something that is not given to most people even once. And to think that we almost turned it away, back then, because we were afraid of what could have been _lost_. And to think, now, of everything we have gained.”

He brings George’s left hand to his lips, kisses the knuckle of his fourth finger, just below his wedding ring.

George’s arms tighten around him. It’s been years since they’ve spoken of the beginning. It seems a million years away.

“Alexander’s is an unassuming beauty, _non_? It sneaks up on you. It works its way into your pattern before you realize that you have gained new colours. New vibrancy. And when I look at you, I see you try to hide this… this potential for joy that you turn away from. To dull it back to grey.”

He stares out over their fence, the oranges fading to deep reds. He feels the miracle of George’s breath behind him, matching his own.

“I love you. And I will not tell you what to do. But I don’t want you to sleep with him, George. I don’t want to sleep with him either.” He takes a deep breath, his heart pounding. “I want you to bring him home.”

He untangles himself from George’s arms and goes inside, leaving him alone in the fading light.

-.-.-.-

George joins him in bed that night, an hour later than he usually does. Lafayette is reading, waiting, because he knows their rhythms. Because he knows George will need to say something, after thinking for that long.

“I’m sorry,” he starts. “I didn’t mean to get upset like that.”

Lafayette gives him a small smile, taking off his glasses. “It is okay. It is natural. This is something big.”

“It makes me so angry,” George rubs a hand over his jaw, like he always does when he’s stressed. “Because I know it isn’t rational, it doesn’t make sense. I shouldn’t feel this way.”

“It is not wrong, _mon cher_ , you know that better than anyone.”

“No, not that. I mean, since you Lafayette, I haven’t felt this way about anyone. And I never wanted to again. I was never looking for it. I didn’t mean to – for it to run this deep.” George finally joins him on the bed, his broad shoulders slumping. He looks so, so tired.

Lafayette rolls towards him, puts a hand on his chest. “That makes it all the more truthful, then.” He draws small circles on George’s muscular chest with his fingertips. Alexander fills his mind again: what he would do with George’s body. How he’d feel. “I am not afraid of losing you. I am not afraid of any of this.”

He feels two things: the enormity of it, how the inescapability of the feeling fills up the room. Something he hasn’t quite admitted to himself yet.

And the way that it seems innocuous. So simple. As if it was something they were both always waiting for.

“I see you in him, too,” George says quietly. “Or, who you used to be. I see that reckless fight, self-destruction masquerading as generosity. The way he holds things so tightly.”

That night, George kisses him as if he’s going to break. Just like he used to. Just like Lafayette expects he might kiss Alexander the first time, if he ever gets to. He doesn’t fight the gentleness – he slips into the warm flood of it, the haze of safety, rolling his hips like water against George’s until George has him pinned, using his tongue to open Lafayette up so slowly that he forgets his own name, just remembers what it’s like to lose himself against this man’s devotion.

-.-.-.-

Monday night, they see a movie – some Sebastian Lelio film that George wants to see, to settle a friendly scholarly argument with Angelica about whether his cinematic aesthetic can be considered queer or not.

It’s dark when they get out of the little art-house theatre. They walk slowly arm-in-arm the four blocks back to their house, through the kind of night that makes Lafayette’s nose sting when he breathes in, that makes him crave the sturdiness of George’s shoulder against his cheek.

He doesn’t remember even a second of the movie. He’d been thinking too hard.

He’s good at reading people, he knows. It’s the reason he’s been called charming by some, and manipulative by others. it’s the way he processes body language, taking a snapshot of their expressions, cataloguing, measuring, giving them what they need, getting what he wants. When Alexander had asked him to meet again earlier that afternoon, to tell him what George said about him at home, that had been exactly what he’d done. He’d given Alexander what he needed: the reassurance, without saying the words, without overwhelming him. Leaving the initiation open.

As for getting what he wants…

He supposes it would be easier if he knew the exact extent of what that is. If he could read himself as well as he could read other people. If he could figure out why he hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to tell George about their meeting, despite how much he’d monologued to Alexander about truth and openness, about taking to George himself.

He thought he’d known what he wanted: to make his husband happy. To let this person into their lives, to enrich what the two of them had, to have the privilege of watching George fall in love again.

He’s never had to consciously stop himself from kissing someone before. That hadn’t been part of the plan. But Alexander’s wrists in his hands, his pliancy, had worked their way under his skin before he’d known why he was leaning over the table, fighting his instincts to _claim_ him.

They pass by old houses with their lights still on, warm light illuminating refinished living rooms, that cherished mixture of old and new that had attracted Gilbert to the neighborhood in the first place.

“Nathanael called today,” George says. “He’s coming down this weekend to see his sister, wants to know if we might host a dinner so he can catch up with Jeremy and David.”

“And me, of course?” Lafayette bats his eyelashes up at George, grateful for the intrusion. It’s a longstanding joke between the two of them, the doomed affair Lafayette and Nathanael had had in New York before he and George had met, which had sense settled into a warm friendship. “I assume I still drive him wild with desire.”

“Hmm, he didn’t mention you,” George jokes. “Must have forgotten I was the lucky one who conquered the heart of New York’s most eligible Frenchman.”

Lafayette swats his arm. “Of course he hasn’t, that would involve him forgetting about _me_.” Then, giving into what’s been weighing on his mind, he suggests: “Let’s plan something for Sunday. You should invite Alexander.”

“You know I can’t stand those spineless academics who parade their grad students around like trick ponies at dinner parties,” George sighs.

“Not as your grad student George, as our guest.” Lafayette thinks of Alexander’s nervousness, how he’d almost bolted the moment he got close, how it might be different if he were with them away from campus.

“But he _is_ my student. I can’t turn that off whenever it’s convenient,” George worries his lip, his exhale a cloud of condensation in the cold. “I’m meeting with him on Thursday,” he says.

“So ask him then.”

George is silent for a while as they walk down the quiet sidewalk, passing through wells of golden streetlight.

“He comes with these papers written,” George says out of the blue. “Each of them like a treatise in itself. And they’re brilliant, they’re better than most of the professors in the department can write. I love working with him, because I know exactly where to push him, exactly how to expose the gaps in his thinking, and he’s always right there with me. He’s always willing to be better. Even though he hardly needs it. It makes me wish I didn’t have to teach him. That we could just sit and talk. That he would let me…”

He trails off.

“He doesn’t really need me, at the end of the day. He just thinks he does.”

Gilbert doesn’t try to correct him, even though he wants to.

Instead, he lets go of George’s hand, steps in front of him, following the swell in his chest, the crescendo of his pulse, and captures his lips in a kiss. Deepens it against the chill.

When he pulls back, George gives him a curious smile. “What was that for?”

Lafayette reclaims his hand, tugging him forward towards their home. “I just love you. That’s all.”

-.-.-.-.-

On Thursday night, Lafayette finds himself sitting in George’s home office, in his leather desk chair, turning his phone over and over in his palm, waiting for a response to the text he’d sent both Alexander and George in the hopes that it would start a conversation about something a little less… academic.

Radio silence. Neither had texted back.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, he supposes. Just like you can convince George Washington that he’s allowed to give into his desire but you can’t make him confess it to his student in the middle of a thesis meeting.

He doesn’t go in George’s office much. Not that it’s barred to him – he just recognizes the importance of having a room of one’s own. But he had been hit by this strange urge, out of nowhere, to be close to his husband. And so he’d come in.

He stares up at the triptych that hangs above George’s desk, three black and white photographs of Lafayette – almost twenty years younger and concerningly thin, his features softer, his lips full and his eyelashes long, even in the candid center shot where he’s cross-legged and smiling down at the ground, the light catching on the insides of his thighs and the creases across his stomach.

He’d read the analysis George had written about their composition. He doesn’t remember much of it now, because he mostly remembers George telling him a few months after they’d met that he’d been drawn to them because the way the photographs captured Lafayette’s body glorified everything that should have, in those days, made young gay men terrified. Innocence and beauty and youth and openness, curtailing into this vulnerability, those come-and-get-me eyes, that beautiful carelessness. The photographs did this fearlessly, unapologetically.

Lafayette wonders what Alexander might look like, if he’d let Lafayette photograph him.

Lafayette also wonders if there’s possibly something wrong with his phone. He presses and holds the power button, forcing a restart, hoping irrationally for a backlog of texts to flood in telling him how well everything had gone.

He’s not nervous. Lafayette doesn’t get nervous. He’s just impatient. He doesn’t like _waiting_ for things.

He checks the time. Glances down at George’s desk, sees a pile of printed emails from a university offering George a chair position in a sexuality studies department on the west coast. It’s the third offer he’s received this year – he always shreds them almost immediately. It would almost double his salary. They wouldn’t have to deal with the dreaded snow. George is such a homebody that it had bothered Lafayette at first, but he’d gotten used to it between his constant trips to France and his understanding that George craves stability. Never wants to leave anything behind.

He spins around in George’s desk chair, letting the room whiz around him. He thinks about calling Adrienne – the only person who he’s certain would understand why he’s feeling so… _impatient_ – if it weren’t two in the morning in France, and if Adrienne were actually likely to give his boy troubles any sympathy.

He draws his knees up to his chest and pouts. The chair finishes its spin facing the opposite wall, in front of the large photograph of Gilbert and George on their first wedding day. Adrienne had taken it. A ridiculous moment, a sort of unrestrained happiness, Gilbert being carried bridal-style in George’s arms, both of them grinning, completely lost in each other’s eyes. Gilbert’s eyes, in the photo, are wet with tears. He remembers how it felt to let the joy out. To not have to pretend he didn’t _feel_ so much.

Looking at it, he feels something bittersweet breaking open within his chest.

He hears George’s key turning in the lock of the front door. And somehow, he can feel it. He _knows_.

He realizes, in that moment, three things.

First, that he and George are rooted, like the tree they’d fallen in love under, deep and solid and secure.

Second, that if he tears open his careful exterior, his composure, his flirtation, there’s a pulsing hope. And it’s scary and it’s making him impatient and – no, god damn it, it’s making him _nervous_ –  but it’s driving him forward. He knows it. He knows this will change them in the best possible ways.

And finally, he realizes how much better the empty spot on the wall next to their wedding photo would look with a new photo next to it. One with three people in it. Balanced and full and more than what he can capture in a portrait, more than the movement of emotion between two bodies, more than duality.

He thinks maybe he doesn’t want to be behind the camera for that one.

He wants to be in it.


End file.
